Alien Safari: Rampage: Alien Safari, #7

By Robert Appleton

Untamed. Unstoppable. Unleashed.

A sudden vicious attack on a safari patrol ship crossing the savanna plains cripples the vessel and almost kills one of the rangers inside. No one got a good look at the creature responsible, but one survivor reports animal features that don't correspond to any known species on that continent. Jan organizes a search party to try to locate the aggressive intruder before it wreaks further havoc on the ecosystem.

The bigger question of how it got there in the first place poses a troubling mystery. Jan has a theory, but to prove it, she'll need the help of her beloved canine companion, Stopper, as well as her detective partner, Vaughn. A race against time to contain the threat and capture the rampaging creature tests even the most talented men and women of the company to their limits. Alien Safari mobilizes like never before to avert disaster in this thrilling novella that epitomizes mankind's custodianship of the wildest planet in the galaxy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Robert Appleton
• Release date: Jun 24, 2025
• ISBN: 9798231380473

Robert Appleton

Robert Appleton is a British science fiction and adventure author who specializes in tales of survival in far-flung locations. Many of his sci-fi books share the same universe as his popular Alien Safari series, though tend to feature standalone storylines. His rebellious characters range from an orphaned grifter on Mars to a lone woman gate-crashing the war in her biotech suit. His sci-fi readers regularly earn enough frequent flyer miles to qualify for a cross-galaxy voyage of their choosing. His publishers include Harlequin Carina Press, and he also ghost-writes novels in other genres. In his free time he hikes, plays soccer, and kayaks whenever he can. The night sky is his inspiration. He has won awards for both fiction and book cover design.

Book preview

​ALIEN SAFARI: RAMPAGE

Robert Appleton

AlienSafari_Logo.png

BOOK 7

Table of Contents

Title Page

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

About the Author

​Chapter One

Vaughn’s abdominals ached after another sustained bout of belly laughter. He just couldn’t help it. Every time Stopper swung out over the water, stiff as a pendulum, his jaws clamped on the rope swing’s horizontal branch, it left his master in stitches. It had struck Vaughn as the funniest thing he’d ever seen the first time he’d seen it—that morning, shortly after setting out—and it still did, hours later, on their return to that same spot.

He laughed so hard he didn’t see the subcutaneous ink alert flashing on his forearm, or hear its beep, or feel its vibration. Just the delightfully insane image of a large daredevil Boxer dog enjoying the sensation of a) defying gravity, and b) hanging on to a really big stick as he swung back and forth, back and forth, proving his prodigious bite strength as well as his boundless determination to please his master.

Vaughn had tried the rope swing first. He was pretty sure Leif Whitsun or one of the other rookies had made it—both rope and branch were fresh. It was the first time he’d used one since his teenage years. But he hadn’t expected, not in a million years, that Stops would jump up to bite it while Vaughn still had hold, and then spin round and round during the elliptical arc of the swing out over the lake. Not only that, he’d quickly become obsessed with it. Partly because he liked the sensation, and partly because of how much it delighted Vaughn.

Ahh, whoa, okay, what have we here? The lawman lifted his visor to wipe the tears from his eyes, resealed his breather, then blinked until his vision was clear enough to read the message alert:

PRIORITY AUDIO MESSAGE RECEIVED 11:24:31 FROM MEDINA, PATRICIA (RANGER)

It’s from Pat.

He used eyecraft to activate her audio message:

"Chief, Pat here. I thought you should know: I’m taking Bo McArden to the hospital at Miramar. He’s suffered a serious leg injury. Our Aeolian was attacked while we were out on patrol. Something big rammed us from the side with incredible force. We’re not sure what exactly, but it had a bony crest, tusks, and what looked like antlers. Both its tusks pierced the passenger door and one of them impaled Bo’s thigh. It almost got the femoral but not quite. It’s made a real mess, though. I’ve managed to stem the bleeding, but he’s going to need surgery and a blood transfusion. Doc Cochran has agreed to fly back from India Outpost to do it—it was his day off, but he’s not gonna leave something so tricky to Feodor.

"Anyway, I was wondering if you and Jane wanted to get involved, with the First Ranger being off-world. I’m gonna search in the XZ database, see if I can identify this thing. I’m certain it doesn’t belong here on the western plains. This is my fourth year here and I’ve never seen anything remotely like it on the prime continent, at least not in the sub-tropics. I wish I had some footage to show you, but it flipped us over when it rammed us, made short work of our thruster manifold while we were inverted. I don’t think it was trying to gore us, just do damage to the Aeolian. We’ll need to retrieve the wreckage. Goran Petrov is flying us out.

Once I’ve dropped Bo off at Miramar, I’ll organize an aerial search so we can find this thing, whatever it is. Let me know if you want to take over, Chief—you and Jane—this might need a full Alien Safari mobilization before we’re done. Pat Medina, out.

Vaughn immediately typed a reply on his wrist pad: ‘Message received, Pat. I’ll fetch Jane and rendezvous with you at Miramar. Don’t send anyone else after this thing yet.’

‘Copy that, Chief. See you at Miramar.’

He curled a quick half-smile at Stopper’s antics, then called out, Come on, boy. Let’s go find Jan.

Music to the big Boxer’s ears, but despite his excitement, demonstrated by a propulsive midair wag of his stunted tail, he waited calmly until his swing reached the bank before he let go of the branch.

Nice moves, said Vaughn, kicking into a jog along the trail to the hoverbike while Stopper sprinted ahead. At their parents’ prompt, a column of downy plaxyllis hatchlings hopped off the path to make way for the lumbering canine. They waited in the undergrowth till Vaughn had passed. He spied the pond they were likely making for. To reach it, they could either cross a straight-shot half-acre of open grassland—dicey, with so many aerial predators waiting in the treetops—or hug the undergrowth around the tree-line and cover three or four times that distance the long way round. A risk in itself, with that increased travel time for so vulnerable an entourage.

The odds of survival were never easy to calculate on Hesperidia. While humans tried to use reason, the creatures here relied solely on instinct. What their hereditary wisdom pointed to and their own experiences sharpened. A billion deaths, and narrow escapes from death, had shaped that wisdom, often reducing it to a fleeting binary choice made without hesitation.

Plaxyllis relied on what was likely, what was known, to make its choice. It may even have been vaguely aware that creatures of canine and human appearance had frequented this trail, that they were relatively harmless. But what if something huge and aggressive and unprecedented suddenly showed up and went berserk? Something that had no business being here and had no respect for the wiles and subtleties of this ecosystem. What, then, would happen to those already precarious survival calculations its vulnerable denizens relied on instinct and experience to make?

Vaughn hoped the plaxyllis family would choose caution, the long way round, but he didn’t stay to find out. He was already thinking ahead to the potential havoc a rogue foreigner could wreak on the populous western plains. A riot of diverse grazing herds and territorial hunters. Whatever the thing was that had downed Pat’s Aeolian, it was a disruptive force that did not belong. If it was just the unnatural ship itself the creature objected to—an alien object, after all—that was one thing. But if Jan identified the interloper as a serious threat to local wildlife as well, they would have to remove it ... somehow.

Securely harnessed in his sidecar, Stopper devoured his Rip ’Em treat and fixed his gaze on the grassland to the southeast. He knew that was the way out through the fens wetlands—the only way out at low alt—and that it would lead them south around the edge of the rainforest, back to Miramar, where Jan was with Desiree LaBeau and Per Haraldsson, the resident XZ vet, seeing to an injured fancomb in the veterinary hospital.

Stopper knew exactly where his mistress was, and the best way to reach her, even from this far out. Dozens of kilometers of swamps and lakes and trees separated them, yet his olfactory memory had mapped this whole region with spooky precision. She’d said that when he was younger he’d once disappeared overnight, and when he’d turned up the following evening, exhausted, he was carrying her favorite blanket. Jan had accidentally left it at a research spot they’d visited early the previous day, and had been upset that she’d lost it. So Stopper had taken it upon himself to fetch it for her ... over seventy kilometers away.

Vaughn gunned the hoverbike’s throttle and soon whipped up spray from the freshwater marshes that flanked the passage out through the eastern fens forest. A brace of curious glimpteryx flew low, keeping pace with the bike. Their silvery-blue wing feathers dazzled whenever the sun reflected off them. They made optimal use of that to blind their prey during a swooping attack, but Stopper ignored their presence altogether here. They would never attack him or any human; they fed on rodent-sized critters, and were instead just enjoying the strange, fast-flying company.

Miramar was already abuzz with news of the attack